STUDENT’S QUALITY OF LIFE INDEX: AN ATTEMPT TO IMPROVE STUDENT’S SATISFACTION AND ENGAGEMENT

For every academic institution, student satisfaction must be one the main concerns, especially if the institution charges a substantial amount of money for the services rendered. This is a basic principle of the quality of service theory: the more satisfied your customers are, the more business you can attract to your organization.

Besides the possibility of attracting more students, satisfaction with the campus life might bring some other significant benefits. Among them, we can assume that a satisfied student learns better, behaves better, generates positive energy among his/her peers, becomes more engaged and consequently, has less incentives to quit. We can argue that an engaged student has more probability of success during and after the academic life.

Understanding the basic elements that contribute to the students’ satisfaction will help institutions to focus on the main aspects that affect the students’ academic experience. Among those aspects, we can mention the academic life (curriculum and faculty’s quality), social life, quality of the facilities, and around campus quality of life. Building an index integrating all the elements that are most important for the students and monitoring that index periodically can provide the administration very valuable information and the possibility of taking action before it is too late.

We propose a student’s quality of life index that can be used to monitor the student satisfaction around the campus and to provide the administration with valuable information for the decision making. For the first test of this index, we use survey results gathered in 2008 among 120 students at the Universidad de Monterrey in Mexico (UDEM). The index is built around 7 domains: academic life, facilities, extracurricular activities, campus safety, support services, concessions, and personal well being. We analyze the results using cross tabs and regression analysis.

After this first attempt to measure the students’ quality life on campus and following the top-down approach, we suggest to adapt the instrument to the specific environment of every institution, considering that the voice of the students must be heard in order to measure what is really important for them.